Ten minutes down the road from Leo’s is Teach Hiúdaí Beag. Sitting there on the last night of my trip, I realized that the Irish pubs I’d frequented in America were imitations of pubs in Ireland that were themselves imitations of pubs like this. There was no pool table, no food. Just a dark room, dark beer, and endless whirling gusts of music from a dozen musicians. Around 11, there was a stir of excitement. A woman in her 60s had entered. She was beautiful, with long blonde hair and a fiddle case by her side. Her name was Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh.
Before I’d come to Ireland, someone had described Ní Mhaonaigh to me as the Queen of Donegal. Listening to her music online, I’d heard a voice as clear and gentle as a mountain stream. Her story seemed to have all the essential Irish themes: romance, loss, longing, perseverance. In 1973, when she was 14, she fell in love with an 18-year-old from Belfast named Frankie Kennedy. Like other people from the six counties under British control, Kennedy spent summers in the Donegal Gaeltacht. It was the height of the Troubles, and Donegal was a refuge. Ní Mhaonaigh would soon make a name for herself as a session fiddler at Teach Hiúdaí Beag. Kennedy learned the tin whistle so he’d have an excuse to spend time with her. They married when she turned 21 and later formed a band called Altan, after a lake at the foot of Errigal, Donegal’s tallest mountain. Soon they were touring America on the wave of the Irish music revival, playing Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl. “We were totally in love and just wanted to be together all the time,” she told the Irish Independent. But while they were on tour in 1992, Kennedy’s back and neck began to hurt. He was diagnosed with bone cancer and died two years later, at 38.
Ní Mhaonaigh remarried and, at 45, had a daughter, Nia Ní Bheirn, in Dublin. After parting from her second husband, she and Nia, then three, moved back to Donegal. At the pub, Ní Bheirn, now 20 and a gifted musician in her own right, accompanied her mother as she made the rounds and greeted friends. Once they’d settled in, I asked Ní Mhaonaigh what accounted for the region’s remarkable creativity. “There’s nothing else to do,” Ní Mhaonaigh said with a laugh.
But perhaps there are deeper reasons, older ones. If science has shown that trees can talk, then perhaps even the skeptics among us should refrain from ruling out the possibility that one source of Donegal’s creativity might not be in Donegal at all. According to the origin myth of the Irish nation, another people already lived in Ireland when the Gaels arrived. The Gaels slaughtered them and drove them from their homes, dispossessing them of their lands just as the British would eventually dispossess the Gaels. The survivors fled into the Otherworld and became fairies—enigmatic beings whose attitude toward humankind was ambivalent at best. There is an old story about a fiddler who, stumbling home from the pub at night, heard an enchanting tune drifting out of a cottage he’d never noticed before. Unable to resist the music’s allure, he opened the door to discover a room full of fairies with fiddles. When he returned to his village at dawn, he found that 50 years had passed and nearly everyone he had ever known was dead. But his loss was our gain, for he had returned bearing the gift of the fairies’ songs. Some say the most beautiful tunes in the Irish tradition come from the Otherworld. This might explain why they so often seem to ache with longing. Just as the Irish yearned for the world the British took from them, the fairies must have yearned for the world they lost to the Irish.
